


No Rest For The Wicked

by hanamixdango



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Drama, F/M, Merman!Itachi, Non-Massacre AU, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-08
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-07-13 21:23:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7137776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hanamixdango/pseuds/hanamixdango
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of Itasaku drabbles, based off requests from my tumblr.</p><p>o4. Sakura is fifteen years old when she betrays Konohagakure</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. What a Wicked Thing To Do

**Author's Note:**

> /fans the flames of the itasaku fandom 
> 
> Modern AU ItaSaku prompt: Sakura needs help with her math course, Sasuke suggests his genius older brother. Itachi becomes her tutor, strange things/feelings ensue.

_to make me dream of you_

_-_

_This was a mistake._

A single bead of cold sweat travelled down the back of Sakura’s neck. She hovered at the doorway of the bedroom, clutching the strap of her backpack like a lifeline.

Uchiha Itachi lounged in all his perfect glory at the end of his low table, idly flipping through a textbook. This was the first time she saw him in casual clothes, not that she saw him often. He looked...soft and comfortable and _relaxed,_ rare - she knew even in the few times she did manage to get a glimpse of him. His hair was up so she could appreciate the the strong line of his jaw, his neck, down to his collarbones bared by his v-neck, and the hint of his toned chest -

Sakura snapped her eyes back to Itachi’s face and found him watching her.

For one tremulous, heart-clenching moment, she thought, _He_ **_knows._ **

“Come in, Sakura,” he said, and she fairly trembled at his tone. Sakura gripped her strap tighter and stepped into the spider’s parlor.

* * *

 

“ _Yo_ _u_ need help. With math,” Sasuke had drawled.

“Derivatives,” Sakura waved a hand in the air, careless as can be. She concentrated on her lunch affecting ease. Sparing a glance through her lashes, she had seen that Sasuke was frowning - nothing new - but there was a sort of cunning in his eye that Sakura didn’t care for. Naruto hadn’t paid any of them attention, and instead heckled at Kiba from across the lunchroom.

“And you want _Itachi_ to tutor you,” he had said, but it more to himself than anything, as if he were turning the idea around his head, analyzing the possibilities.

Really, she should have cut her losses and ran the moment Sasuke narrowed his eyes in her direction, but she was curious and a little in love. The moment she saw Itachi Uchiha _laugh,_ she knew she’d chosen. She told herself she’d do anything to get him to laugh like that again, to smile like that at _her._ Even if she had to pretend that she was struggling with one subject she knew she could ace no problem.

Swallowing down her bite of food and her fluttering anxiety, she replied, “Yes.”

 

* * *

 

 _Definitely a mistake,_ Sakura thought as she kneeled at the opposite end of the table from Itachi. She could feel his eyes tracking her movement. If he wanted to make her feel like prey and self-conscious, he was doing an astounding job.

“Thank you for taking the time to help me,” she murmured. She wasn’t brave enough to meet his eyes yet, but at least she remembered her manners.

The silence that greeted her almost made her look up - and she did - but he wasn’t there. A shadow cast over her, and then he was beside her - _close_ beside her, enough to feel his body heat sear the right side of her. He sat down with natural grace, his thigh pressed against her own.

 _He definitely knows,_ Sakura panicked, but then a second later thought, _how can one man smell so_ good?

And he did, like something spicy and warm, heady and full like the scent of newly split sandalwood -

Itachi leaned a shade closer to Sakura than what was considered polite, elbow and fist supporting the side of his face. He regarded her through heavy lashes, strands of his hair falling loose from his bun caught in those same long lashes. She decided right there that the amount of appeal Itachi Uchiha held was incredibly unfair. Had she ever really stood a chance from tangling into his web?

“Sasuke tells me you’re having trouble with...derivatives.”

 _That’s not all he told you, apparently_. It was clear by the way Itachi enunciated ‘derivatives’ that he didn’t believe her pretense of needing help at all. She was going to murder Sasuke - slowly - but first she needed to somehow come up with a plan of retreat with her dignity intact. Sakura berated herself for being foolish. Of course he would see right through her, and she hadn’t even taken out her notebook yet...even going as far as to tease her with long glances and lingering touches.

Before she could open her mouth to splutter apologies, Itachi tangled his fingers with hers and brought her hand to his mouth.

“Sakura,” he damn near purred, his breath washing over her knuckles and setting every tiny hair on her body alight. His gaze was _warm._ “If you wanted my time, you need only ask.”


	2. What's That Sound I Hear Down Under

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a little continuation of an AU idea I had where Itachi is a merman prince and Sakura was a captain and adventurer of the seas. I was talking to a friend about it and made a little narration/fic sort of thing which you can read here:
> 
> http://hanami--dango.tumblr.com/post/120586606002/mermanitachi-au

_is it your heart or is it just thunder_

_-_

“Sakura,” he sighed into her mouth, “I’ll never tire of your taste.”

Itachi kissed her from just a hairsbreadth above the water’s surface. Her pink hair tumbled from the rim of her small boat and into the water, surrounding him. She smelled like something wonderful, like sea brine and the oiled wood from her ship and spices he couldn’t recognize from a city he would never see. He kissed her slow, tongue tracing the inside of her lips, learning her flavor again after so many weeks.

The mid-afternoon sun filtered through ocean cavern, warming the shallow pools and striking the water a glittering jade. Itachi’s maroon scales glimmered in the clear water, his long tail swayed back and forth in lazy motions under Sakura’s small row boat. Her ship was anchored beyond the cavern, sails as white and vast as the cumulus clouds that drifted in the blue sky. Gentle waves lapped against the boat and cavern walls. The seagulls bayed above as mouths met over and over again.

“Itachi,” Sakura murmured, gentling his demanding kisses, but he arched into her at the sound of his name - he loved it when she spoke his name. “I must set sail soon, the Queen-”

Words he didn’t want to hear. He contemplated yanking the magick stone from around his neck that allowed him to understand her language, and doing the same with Sakura’s matching necklace. He nipped her bottom lip.

“Your Queen demands too much,” he huffed, and pulled away, though just enough so that his forehead pressed against hers. It was a childish comment borne from childish desire, but he wanted all of her time.

Sakura’s smile was wry as she caressed his jaw line to his pointed ear, mindful of his sensitive gills. Itachi leaned generously into her touch as her fingers threaded through his hair underwater.

“Duty calls,” she said and it was a sentiment that he felt deep in his bones.  

“I’d follow if you if I could.” And he did when the circumstances allowed him and his own kingdom was quiet if only for a moment. His human sailed far in name of her country, intercepting criminals and retrieving lost treasures from times long past - she was an adventurer for her Queen.

The first time Itachi tailed Sakura on her expeditions was when he was beside himself with worry. She was just a small human, so delicate looking and would surely break in face of danger. Worse, she would be taken from him forever. When the time came for the raid, Itachi could only watch Sakura from the sea as she boarded and assaulted an enemy ship, her saber was just a glint of metal in the sunlight; her strikes quick like darting silver fish and brutal as the snap of a shark’s jaw. She struck an impressive figure amid the splintered wood and black plumes of smoke of the sinking enemy ship, eyes as dark as emeralds and a snarl twisted on her lips. Her voice rose above the roar of canonfire, Itachi remembers, and was like thunder rolling across the tumultuous seas before a hurricane. He hadn’t understood what she had said then, but he felt the sound of it reverberate in his own throat down his trachea and stir something dark and ravenous.

Only when the last of her crew escaped the sinking ship did Sakura join her band of fellow adventurers. Her pale pink hair fluttered in the wind as she jumped from rail to rail, sheathing her saber in one smooth motion. She had growled one last command, and her ship steered away from the burning wreckage, now just another victim swallowed by the dark ocean. Itachi was lovesick and starstruck, and the pleasure in the pit of his belly coiled and uncoiled like an eel. How strong and resilient and unerring his woman turned out to be. He had never felt a desire so demanding and yawning as he did for his human.

He feared he might unnerve her with how voracious his hunger was for her, but Sakura kept returning to their secret cavern, sometimes sweet-smelling and freshly washed, other times like a beautiful shipwrecked survivor. “I wanted to see you first,” she’d say as she would wrap her arms around his shoulders and dip into the water with him. Itachi would take her deeper into the pools and show her how pleased he was.

“Don’t sulk,” Sakura laughed and startled him from his contemplation. “I won’t be gone too long this time, only for maybe a week or so.”

To his minute horror, Itachi found that he _was_ pouting. _If my family could see me now,_ he mused and brushed away Sakura’s teasing pokes. His human could bring out facets of himself he didn’t even know he had.

“Did I offend my liege?” his roguish captain intoned solemnly, hand held over her heart in mock salute. Itachi spied the humorous glint in her sea glass eyes and it sparked his own mischievous streak.

Without warning, he lunged and wrapped his arms around Sakura’s torso - she yelped - and he pulled her into the crystalline water. She fell in with a great splash, flailing about for a moment before breaking the surface with spluttered curse of his name. At full height, the water came just beneath her breasts.

“You’re lucky the water is warm,” she grumbled, flipping drenched bangs from her face.

He chuckled low in his throat and tilted her head back to kiss the water droplets dripping down her chin. He enjoyed the way the sea tasted on her skin - but not so exquisite as on the taste of her lips, so Itachi helped himself. She opened her mouth under his gentle coaxing with a pleased hum and he angled his head to take and take and **take** _._ He curled his tail around Sakura’s legs to draw her closer so that he could feel her molded to his body, tail fin caressing her ankles. His clawed hands raked through her slicked hair, down her neck and over her shoulders. He felt the power in her lithe muscles, felt the way her stomach clenched when his fingers traced the curve of her waist. _I’m addicted,_ he thought faintly over the blood rushing through his ears.

Sakura broke away with a gasp, her hands on his shoulders in firm pressure.

“Okay, prince, that’s enough out of you,” she said, breathless, “Help me back in the boat.”

Itachi gathered her up in one arm - she was so _light_ \- and with a surge of his tail, deposited her carefully in the vessel, his other hand steadying the rocking. He remained perched over the rim, watching as Sakura wringed the last of the water from her soaked clothing.

“A parting memento,” Itachi said as he held up a fist. Curiously, Sakura cupped her hands beneath his clenched one and inhaled when pearls clinked onto her palms. Freshwater pearls in the shape of raindrops, opalescent ones as fat as a pit of a peach, black ones with iridescent sheen, and even ones in the color of her hair.

“How did you - where did-” Sakura sighed and grimaced, “I’m amassing quite the fortune. You know you don’t-”

Itachi halted her protestations with a thumb on her lips.

“It pleases me to lavish you with gifts.”

And he’d give her more too, he promised himself, pretty things many men sunk into his sea to obtain - she’d have them all. Itachi had never been interested in treasure, but he found the need to give Sakura only the rarest and finest of trinkets; gold and silver doubloons from sunken pirate ships and only the biggest of abalone shells. Tusks of narwhals and ivory from whale-kings long past.  She’d have necklaces made from rubies and jade and moonstone, of obsidian carved in her likeness from the molten depths of his domain. He would travel to the frigid northern expanse and back to the temperate southern seas to find a jewel that would match the clarity and color and depth of her eyes. He’d give her his scales too, only the widest and brightest ones fresh from his throat and nape of his neck. Nothing was too fine for her.

Sakura carefully tucked the pearls into the pocket of her wet trousers. Capturing his gaze, she brought both hands to her right ear and removed her dangling amethyst earring. She pressed it into his palm and closed his fingers over it, and cradled his fist between both her hands.

“It’s a family heirloom, passed down from my mother and her mother before her. I’d like you to keep one, if you don’t mind,” Itachi watched fascinated as her cheeks grew red, “You’ve given me so much so I…” she trailed off, chancing a glance at her merman who loomed over her.

“Thank you,” he murmured, and felt his chest swell with an emotion he couldn’t name but wanted to hold on to for as long as he lived. Her answering smile, parts relieved and pleased, made him want to drag her back into the water. Instead, he whispered to the current to carry her safely to her anchored ship.

“Be safe,” he kissed the hollow of her throat where her pulse throbbed, “and come back to me soon.”


	3. Somebody Catch My Breath

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Anon asked for a prompt where Itachi was a ghost and was attached to Sakura, who is a medium. I did a little twist and did a riff off of canon divergence.

_I want to be known by you_

_-_

“Get up, Sakura.”

“I liked it better when you couldn’t talk,” she wheezed. Still, she struggled to raise herself from the dirt. Pain thrummed down her arms, down her back, her thighs. She blinked away the blood in her eyes, a cut somewhere in her hairline. Drawing herself on her elbows, she circulated healing chakra to the gash that ran from her hip to across her back, but only enough to dull the pain and quell the bleeding. She would need every drop if she wanted to get out of this alive.

“You can complain to me after we move. They’re closing in fast.”

Sakura suppressed her snarl, and got to her feet with shaking knees. Sweat dripped off her nose and she spat out the blood pooling in her mouth. Her muscles were throbbing, head aching, and her heart pounding wildly in a rapid staccato rhythm. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t bring in the air fast enough to relieve her burning lungs. She lost the full range of her left arm thanks to the injury on her back-

“ _Sakura, now_.”

And so, with years of experience of being a missing nin, she _shunshin_ -ed away from the carnage in the open field and took to the trees, pumping her legs as fast as she was able, heedless of the branches leaving shallow cuts across her cheeks, her chin. Through the leaves, the sun sank deeper in the sky, until it was a mere sliver of gold resting on the horizon. The forest would be enveloped in darkness soon, and she would have nothing but the glow of Itachi’s ghost for light.

“They’ve caught up,” his voice hissed in her ear, close, “your six o’clock-”

Sakura ducked down - she could hear the clanging sound of chain links overhead - and pivoted to her right, springing off the branch in a burst of chakra, and catching the flanking hunter-nin off guard for a half a second. It was all the hesitation she needed to wrap her good hand around his throat and squeeze. Sakura dropped down to the forest floor before the dead body hit the ground.

Shadows crept wider and longer across the thicket and gnarled roots - _you have three minutes of sunlight, make it count_ \- as the second wave of Danzou’s exterminators dropped down from the high boughs with barely a sound. She counted one, two, three -

“Four of them,” Itachi said from behind her, “The wolf mask is targeting your injured side.”

He was pushing to insinuate his presence in corporeal form, she could tell by the way the air dropped a few degrees and her breath came out in puffs of white frost. The back of her neck felt cold, and the chill traveled down her spine. He tried, but Sakura also knew that he wouldn’t succeed - he had already burned the energy from assisting her in the first battle.

The hunters didn’t see or hear him, but it wouldn’t be the first time Sakura’s heard voices in her head.

The sound of clanking metal links drew her attention, and she tilted her head fractionally to eye the shinobi who wielded the counterweight of his _kusarigama_ that nearly bludgeoned the back of her head. He swung the weight in slow circles, feet inching forward. Sakura decided that she would save him for last.

“Well?” she growled and they _moved_ in tandem, weapons outstretched. Wolf Mask reached her first, the blade of his tanto glinting orange in the fading light, aiming for her injury, but Sakura pivoted away - she could feel the flat of the blade brushing against her tattered vest - and caught the back of his head with her elbow. He went down and didn’t get back up again.

“Below!”

She jumped, drawing her knees to her chest, hissing when she stretched her back wound, as two arms sprouted from the ground, grasping futilely at her ankles. Sakura brought her feet down _hard,_ feeling the rock and the man’s ribcage give underneath her boots. Not losing momentum, she sprung from the crater, attempting to catch the third in a clothesline. He was faster, bending over in a back handspring, flipping backwards two more times, fingers blurring in hand signs. The _kusarigama_ weight came at her head again, keeping her occupied.

“Earth jutsu,” Itachi called out from somewhere behind her and Sakura _grinned_. If Danzou wanted her dead, he would need to do a much better job than to send hunter-nin who knew nothing of her MO. Sliding her final kunai from her thigh holster, she pinned the chain to the trunk of an oak.

The ground underneath her feet shook, but years of splitting apart the earth with her bare fists taught her to keep her center of gravity low. Spikes of rock jutted in a straight line intending to impale her, but Sakura wasn’t cowed. Cocking her right elbow back, she honed her chakra in her fist to the densest concentration possible, and with a guttural _shannaro!_ drove it into the loam.

The land groaned and rumbled with the stress before cracking open in a gaping chasm, crumbling the jutsu’s spikes to dust. The earth user couldn’t gain the footing to escape the disintegrating ground and fell into the fissure with a shout.

“ _Sakura!”_

Her brief moment of triumph cost her, or rather, the damned _kusarigama_ did, right between her fourth and fifth rib, knocking the breath right from her lungs. In reflex, she wrapped her hand around the chain so it wouldn’t recoil back. She was grateful for small mercies that it was the iron weight rather than the blade end that caught her off guard. The chain ranged with tension, the remaining adversaries embroiled in a brief tug-of-war, before the hunter-nin relented and vaulted at her with chakra sparking his feet. He raised the sickle high, curved blade winking gold in the last of the light, and Sakura took a single step back. In a move rehearsed a thousand times before in training - back when Konoha was _whole_ \- she grabbed his wrist before he could complete his downward slash, and hooked her leg behind his, kicking it out from beneath him. She grabbed his face with her right hand, pushing him backwards and without his balance, he went down like a felled tree, landing on his back with a heavy _thud._ The sickle skittered across the floor when Sakura slammed his wrist against a stray rock. She pressed her knee against his sternum, holding the nin in place. Between her splayed fingers, she saw his dark eyes widen behind his mask.

With no effort at all, Sakura crushed his skull.

Itachi made no sound when she released the dead body, fingers unwinding from his shattered mask, his broken wrist. The laceration in her back throbbed like it was on fire, and she dared to siphon a little more of her dwindling supply of chakra to mute the pain.

Maybe one day she would look back on her kills with shame and disgust, but all she had now was the heat of her fury simmering low in her gut and the desperate instinct to survive. At least until she found a way to rip Danzou off his ill-gotten throne. And apparently, it all laid in the hands of a dead man.

Now shrouded in darkness, Sakura found the nearest trunk and leaned all her weight into it. She wanted to sink onto the floor and sleep, but she still had so many miles to go to find Itachi’s body, deep in enemy territory and teeming with enemy-nin. Danzou had been either too arrogant or too stupid to not burn the corpse, but it was a mistake they both were willing to exploit to the fullest.

His ghost drifted closer and the temperature around him dropped.

“We cannot stay here,” he murmured, close yet again, why did he always draw so close? “We have to keep moving.”

She opened her eyes, not realizing she had closed them, and regarded him through her lashes. He hovered a few feet from her, eyebrows crinkled in such potent concern that had no business making her chest flutter like a bird. _Fractured ribs,_ she told herself. She closed her eyes again so she did not have to look upon his pristine appearance when she surely looked like she had been through the slaughterhouse.

“I need a moment,” she whispered back, voice cracking with the grit that stuck in her throat. Every wound inflicted upon her throbbed with dull pain. She was so _tired_  and homesick and she missed her friends terribly. She wanted Ino and Naruto and Tsunade, but they were scattered to the wind. Dead for all she knew - _no. That’s dangerous thinking, Sakura, suck it up and get your ass moving. You didn’t watch Konoha burn to sit here and sulk about how tired you are._

She shook her head once, to disperse the black edging her vision. _For Konoha,_ the voice in her head hissed.

The shock of cold on her cheek made her open her eyes again. Itachi was closer than before, his open palm hovering over her right cheek in a mockery of affection, and traced his hand down, thumb hovering over her split bottom lip as if he wanted to brush the blood flaking there away. Sakura felt his wintry aura chill her skin, sapping the heat from her body. The part of her that still craved tenderness, wanted with acute desperation that she could feel his skin, feel _warmth._

Haunted for three months, in her dreams, the hollows of her eyelids, her peripherals, Sakura had thought she had finally become unhinged. Then the ghostly touches started - her hair, the back of her neck. She cropped it up to loneliness and paranoia, both constant companions in her life as a missing nin, but then she heard his voice. He whispered her name in the darkness of the night and she knew she wasn’t spiraling into lunacy. Uchiha Itachi, a man who Sasuke murdered five years ago, manifested himself before her eyes with a single, plaintive request.

_I need your help._

Three months and she was still chasing a half made plan of a dead man in some wild offshoot chance she could bring him to life.

“Why me?” she had asked him one time, deep in Ame, when the stars had come out and she had made a fire to keep her warm through the night. He didn’t answer her, but he looked at her like he regretted her somehow, so she never asked again. Until today.

_Why me? Why did you come to me, why when there are others who are more qualified than I am? Why do you look at me like you do?_

All of her questions rolled into two words, and she wasn’t sure which answer she feared the most.

Itachi’s hand fell away from her neck, and this time too, he offered no answer, silent as a wraith.


	4. Pistols At Dawn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Request was for ANBU!Itachi meeting Akatsuki!Sakura
> 
> also age!swap au? Or timeline what timeline.

_this is me reaching and you wanting to run_

_-_

Sakura Haruno is fifteen years old when she betrays Konohagakure.

  
Itachi remembers it clearly, because that was the day his brother came home from the end of the war, blind in one eye with an unconscious, bleeding Naruto slung across his back.

  
He stayed in the hospital for three days, watching over his older brother and his teammate. As it turned out, Sasuke’s blindness was reversible, and Naruto’s injuries, though severe, were never life-threatening. It was either by virtue of Tsunade Senju’s medical prowess or the sloppiness of the enemy nin that both survived, and Itachi wasn’t sure to whom he should be more grateful.

  
But the third bed laid empty like an unspoken question.

  
When Itachi worked up the courage to ask, Naruto’s expression crumpled like a house of cards, his heartbeat spiking on the monitor. Sasuke turned his face away, staring out the window with his single unbandaged eye, his raspy voice guttural - angry and sharp.

“She said she was tired of following orders.”

  
The realization lanced through him, that it was _Sakura Haruno_ who nearly carved his older brother’s eye out, who was responsible for the fresh scars on Naruto’s body. Disbelief permeated him; it was also Sakura Haruno who single-handedly sustained and healed their vanguard, Konoha’s crucial push into Kusagakure. It was Sakura Haruno’s fists that destroyed the Kannabi Bridge and cinched Konoha’s victory. And years ago, it was Sakura who-

  
Memories of the emergency room, the murmurings of overworked medics and nurses, slowly unfurled in his mind. As he sat there, next to his father and mother, wondering if his aniki, the heir to the clan, would lose his prized doujutsu, if the fourth Hokage would lose another family member, he anchored onto the whispered hope.

  
_If they had cut deeper, the Hokage’s son would have died from blood loss._

  
_If they had managed to swipe any lower, Uchiha-sama’s eye would be beyond saving._

  
_We’re lucky-_

_How fortunate-_

_It’s amazing-_

  
Sloppiness, indeed. Eleven-year-old Itachi sits in his plastic chair, and witnesses the break of Konohagakure’s infamous Team Seven. Naruto’s beeping heart monitor punctuates Sasuke’s deafening silence, and everything comes to a quiet and terrible sort of sense.

  
-

  
Itachi learns, as he enters ANBU and rises quickly through the ranks, to detest violence. Moreover, he learns to hate war. Seven years later, Itachi is still cleaning up the consequences of the Third Shinobi war. There is no justification for such wide-scale destruction and needless death. Entire villages are left ravaged, wiped off the map, caught in the crossfire. Vagabonds who have no place to call home form dangerous criminal rings. Orphanages are near to bursting with not enough resources to feed the children through winter. Ninja villages that were on the wrong side of the war still rumble in discontent and increase border activity.

  
Among the muddy waters, Konoha intelligence catches wind of an group more sinister and organized than simple B-class missing-nin.

  
And then, one by one, the jinchūriki end up dead.

  
-

  
When Minato summons Itachi to his office, he doesn’t expect Senju Tsunade to be there, with a thunderous scowl on her face.

  
“I need you to meet our spy,” the Yondaime says without preface. He sifts through the paperwork on his desk until he comes across the scroll he wants, “at this disclosed location. You are to go alone.”

  
Itachi takes the proffered missive and unravels its contents. The rendezvous location will be at the destroyed Kannabi Bridge. Behind his porcelain mask, Itachi’s lips tighten, and an uncomfortable picture starts to form in his head.

  
His scroll erupts into flame, until there’s not even ash left.

  
“I was not aware we had a spy in Akatsuki,” and then he adds belatedly, “Hokage-sama.”

  
“This is our first direct contact since they were implemented,” Tsunade answers. She steps forward and gives him a look that could level mountains, “Let me be clear here, Uchiha. Nobody but the people in this room knows about this. If you compromise-”

  
“What Tsunade-hime means,” Minato interjects, and her teeth click when she snaps her jaw shut, “Is that this mission is of paramount importance. What our mole will reveal will determine how Konoha will react. As our top agent we’re trusting this task to you.”

  
Then, Minato smiles his smile that he thinks is disarming, but really, just reveals the lethal shinobi he is underneath.

  
“You tell no one.”

  
_Not your superiors, not your clan, not to Sasuke, and not to Naruto._

  
Itachi hears his orders loud and clear, and disappears in a wisp of smoke.

  
-

  
He has it figured out by the time he arrives at the rendezvous point an hour early, so it’s no surprise when he finds one Sakura Haruno resting underneath the shade an oak tree.

  
There a sort of quiet tragedy about her, but that air disappears when her eyes flutter open. They are chips of ice, drilling into his porcelain mask as if she could divine who he is underneath. It’s been nearly ten years since he’s been face to face with her, and a selfish, indulgent part of him wonders if she ever remembered the little boy she saved once upon a time.

  
Sakura takes her time rising from the ground, brushing off her garish black and red cloak. Itachi stands still and watches her movements. She moves deliberately, hands out in the open and not hidden by the cloak’s sleeves. Though Sakura has become infamous enough that every hunter-nin in any country knows she can kill without use of hand signs or a weapon. Tsunade had been thorough in her training.

  
Days before this meeting, Itachi thought of a thousand ways of how their conversation might go. There’s a certain anticipation that had been building within his chest, squeezed tight like fist when he sighted her. There were questions he wanted to ask that went beyond his station. He wondered if it would be cruel to tell her about her old teammates. How Naruto talks about her like the war took her, how Sasuke talks about her none at all. He wanted to tell her about how Konoha has been without her there - because if she was willing to forsake her home in order to protect it, shouldn’t she have a right to know? All these thoughts swirled in his mind as Sakura squared her shoulders to fully face him. Then, she speaks first and shatters all his imagined expectation.

  
“You are ill.”

  
He smothers his natural instinct to flinch. Sakura cocks her head infinitesmally, staring at his chest as if she truly could peel back his layers and see the disease festering there. He finds it more ironic than amusing that with just three words she’s revealed his longest kept secret. Not even his clan knows. She flicks her eyes back to his mask when he doesn’t reply.

  
She moves forward - glides really - towards him. Her tread is silent as she sidesteps the bridge rubble now overgrown with moss and lichen. She pulls back her billowing sleeve, revealing her pale, slender wrist and brings her fingertips just below his collarbone, where his black under armor meets his ANBU vest. His Sharingan flares in response, but it’s not combat chakra that envelops her hand.

Her healing chakra feels the same as it did ten years ago, and unbidden, he closes his eyes as it sweeps through his chest.

  
“Breathe in deeply,” she says, and he does. Itachi can immediately feel the difference, how his breath doesn’t sound wet or hitch in his throat.

  
“Hold it,” Sakura murmurs and he opens his eyes to find a small wrinkle in her brow. His Sharingan reveals to him what the naked eye doesn’t; the striations of green in her eyes, the faint spatter of pale freckles, how her lashes are more dark pink than brown, the stray candyfloss hairs caught in those same long, delicate lashes. She has a faint scar on her right cheekbone and Itachi clenches his fists to keep from touching it, to see if her skin is as smooth as it looks.

  
“Exhale.”

  
He breathes out slowly and wonderment seizes him. The pain is gone. He feels sharper now that he doesn’t have to divert his energy in suppressing his symptoms.

  
_That’s twice now,_ he wants to say but doesn’t in risk of sounding foolish.

  
“It’s gone,” he says instead and lets his gratitude shine through in his tone.

  
“For now,” Sakura murmurs, and lets her hand fall away. There’s a crinkle in between his black armor and vest. A note.

  
“Whatever reasons you have for hiding that,” she taps his chest once, looking up at his mask, “Is surely not worth your life.”

  
He has no words to rebut her statement without sounding childish, so he inclines his head once.

  
The first threads of dawn filter through the canopy and Itachi has a strange premonition that this will be the last time he will see her. The lines seem deeper on her face as she turns away.

  
“They’re well,” he blurts, and stops her. After a pause, he says in a quieter voice, “They miss you.”

  
He doesn’t need to say any more. Over her high collar, he can see the ice in her eyes melt. She gives him a small smile, like spring breaking through winter’s frost. In that moment, as she coalesces into cherry blossom petals, he wishes fervently, vehemently, naively, that somehow, some way, he could bring her home.

  
-

  
When Itachi goes home that night, bone-weary and tired in places he can’t name, he brushes off his family’s concerns and goes straight to bed. He lies there, blanket drawn to his middle and hands laced over his chest. He stares at the rafters of his room, the dust motes floating in the moonlight cast from his windows. He closes his eyes and sees petal pink and mournful spring green eyes. He remembers the grace of her hands when she pressed her delicate fingertips against his chest. Healer’s hands. Never had he knew a more subtle tenderness until that day.

  
And when he slips into sleep, he dreams of what he had wanted to do differently. He dreams of curling his fingers around hers, to see how she might fit in his hand. To feel her skin and see if she was as cold as she pretended to be. He dreams of what he wanted her to do. To mention the day she saved him as a child, that it was a memory that she thought of often. He wanted her to speak his name, wanted to know how it sounded in her lilting, womanly voice.

  
When Itachi wakes up the next morning, he is once again Uchiha Itachi of Konohagakure. He slips on his ANBU uniform, piece by piece in methodical silence. His vest, his armguards, shin guards. His tanto is strapped to his back. He pulls his bone white mask over his face and flash-steps into the cool morning, towards the Hokage’s Tower.

  
The Yondaime is waiting for him.

  
But he pauses.

  
Itachi grips the scrap of paper Sakura had slipped into his vest, its weight like lead in his fist. He unfolds it and drinks in her elegant handwriting. It details the other members of the Akatsuki organization, and their goals, their targets. The kind of information his comrades have died for.

  
He should go to the Hokage right away. He should be reporting this information so the village can mobilize, gather allies, and strike before the start of another war even begins.

  
(No more tragedies, no more orphans, no more Sakuras.)

  
At the bottom of the note, there is a single emphatic line, different from the almost clinical tone she had listed the information.

  
_‘Protect him, please.’_

  
Him. Naruto.

  
The air leaves his lungs.

  
_He is eight again, Sakura’s long pink locks flutter in his peripheral, surrounding him with a pleasant floral fragrance despite the wear of war. There’s a wide bandage on her cheek. The rush of adrenaline still lingers in his system. His would-be kidnapper lays unconscious among the wreckage of felled trees. The scent of splintered wood and churned dirt is thick, but Sakura’s gentle knuckles under his chin draw his attention to her face. Her regard and concern is a heady thing, and there isn’t quite a word to describe the clarity and verdant of her eyes. He is eight years old again, and her concern is novel and strange, but not unwelcome. Her thumb brushes against the cut on his brow, the healing chakra cool and soothing. He almost protests when she withdraws her touch, but her eyes keep him silent. They are kind and compassionate and Itachi is starved of those things - he drinks them in greedily._

  
_“Are you okay?”_

  
Itachi is eighteen again and he is an ANBU operative for Konohagakure. He’s sworn his complete loyalty to his village and to his Hokage. Haruno Sakura is a traitor and an S-class missing ninja. His mind flips through the cold, impersonal facts about her listed in the Bingo books. Her appearance, her height, her known jutsu, her last known appearances.

  
It doesn’t mention how the green of her eyes changes in filtered sunlight. It doesn’t mention the fragile line of her shoulders, weighed down by the burden of being a double-agent. Doesn’t mention what breaking the trust and love of her friends cost her. Not the kindness she still harbors, not the unwavering loyalty to her village that turned its back on her, not her stalwart and unerring sense of duty.

  
As Itachi steps through the threshold into the Yondaime’s office, he draws a line in his mind. The dream he had, the memory of her saving him as a child, the grace of her hands as she cured his illness with a single touch - those are the things he allows himself, private and ensconced from reality.

  
He tells himself, as he crosses the room with long, purposeful strides, not to think about what ifs. Naruto is the village’s strongest soldier, and its biggest liability. He’s also the Yondaime’s son, Minato’s only surviving family. There isn’t anything he wouldn’t do to protect him, not after Kushina died and left the fox to their child.

  
Itachi crushes his emotions as Minato reads over Sakura’s note with a grim face. He doesn’t dare hope for anything more, doesn’t think on how she’ll never be able to come home. War is coming again - it’s a sentiment he can read in the lines of the Hokage’s face without him even parting his lips. What is one stranded spy’s life in lieu of a village’s worth? Of a son’s?

  
Itachi knows the answer, and tries not to feel bitter.

  
_end._


End file.
